News

Northland College Professor of Music Joel Glickman has been writing and
playing music since before Richard Nixon was in office yet he only
recently catalogued all of them. As he typed the list
of his 30 or more songs, he noticed the theme of water ran
through most of them.

“At first I was surprised by this discovery but then realized that
I shouldn’t have been—all of life and our life’s blood stems from water,”
Glickman said. “It sustains us and graces our lives where and when it
is beautiful. It threatens us when it storms or floods or does
so by its absence in times of drought.”

Glickman will present an evening of 10 songs and two readings
entitled, “Water Music,” Thurs., May 16 at 7:30 p.m. at the Sigurd Olson
Environmental Institute. The concert is one of the events marking the 40th anniversary
of the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute.

Glickman started teaching at Northland College in 1974 but he
started writing songs even before that. He plays the clarinet and writes songs
with a five-string banjo. Many people write songs at the
piano and he tried that, he said. The guitar too, but
in the end he found his “happy zone” with the banjo.

Glickman will play his banjo Thursday night, with the backdrop of
Bay City Creek that flows next to the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute on
the Northland College campus. Glickman never met Sigurd Olson but feels
connected to the conservationist through water.

“Individually and collectively everyone responds to water," Glickman
said. “I am guilty of emulating the flow of water, often consciously trying to
make the sound of a clarinet or five-string banjo deeper, more liquid, and more
clear.”

Glickman composed and arranged all but one of the songs that will be
performed at Water Music, a collection, he said, that celebrates a lifetime of recreating
in, listening to, watching and dreaming about water.